design / illustration / photography / curiosity

On twitter a month or so ago I spotted a call for women zine makers to submit work for an exhibition in London. Being as I’m both a woman and have dabbled with zines before I decided that this might very well be worth me having a hand in and so have dug around to find copies of my old zines and created a new one with my illustration work specially to send down.

The first of the zines that I’m sending down is Survival Guide, which was created as a mock issue for part of my third year uni work. The idea was that students would work together to create each individual issue which would then be distributed in pop up shops around the country.

The second zine is an old one for me, something that I created in the middle of my second year to address the feeling of hatred. The hatred I chose to show was my hate of being a member of staff at KFC and all the horrible people that I’d had to serve (I’m so glad I don’t work there any more!) The zine was actually bound in KFC brown bags after I’d sampled a variety of different pieces of packaging to see which one worked best. The illustrations inside were really stress relieving to work on.

The third and final zine is a compilation of some of the illustration work that I’ve created over the past 2 years. There’s no real theme here like with the other two, I just wanted to get as much of my work down into this exhibition as I could. I got a colour copy done as well to keep myself and take to interviews as a quick sample of what I’m capable of doing.

If you’re interested in visiting the Tatty Devine Girls & Zines event starts on the 3rd of August. I’ll be trying to make it down if I can. 🙂

As I mentioned a few posts back, I recently found out that I’d been commended for my YCN entry into the Fedrigoni brief. I’ve been watching my post like a hawk for the past few days and today I received this beauty. I had to photograph the envelop before I’d even opened it as I knew I’d end up damaging it and it was too pretty not to get a record of.

Fedrigoni don’t give hugely detailed feedback, but it had me grinning after the horrible grilling that I got from the ISTD for my entry this year. I can’t wait to head down to London for the awards ceremony, I’m thinking of making a short holiday out of it with Mat and filling the time gallery hopping.

As I’m sure many of you already know, it’s degree show season across the UK at the moment and Lincoln is no exception. This year’s Graphic Design show is here and its LOUD!

For our business cards we were given restrictions this year- we had to create something which was based around a sound effect that we felt reflected us in some way. The vast array of work that people created for these was great- you can see how varied we’ve all become as designers.

For my own card I chose the Japanese onomatopoeia of kiri-kiri which is the sound of a pen scratching on paper, something which is always happening for me whether its illustrating, writing or mapping out ideas.

The show had a great feeling of unification, everything fits together beautifully and even the building has been painted to help showcase things and create an easy system of navigation.

And now for the bit that everyone is waiting for, some examples of the work that are available at Show Elleven.

Firstly, some work from down in the Illustration section, which is where my first piece of work was situated.

An array of covers for the Puffin and Penguin competitions of this year are also being showcased. Unfortunately we didn’t win with any of them, but there’s some stunning designs that should have gone further in the competition.

Throughout our three years at Lincoln we’ve created a lot of publications of various shapes, sizes and contents. Here are some examples of the ones which are on display at Show Elleven, although they are far from the only ones.

There’s plenty more to see at Show Elleven and you can’t get the feel for books, posters and instillation while they’re just on your screen, so if you’re in the East Midlands area and you’ve got yourself a few hours spare pop down between now and Friday 17th to see our work. More details can be found here. And as for my own work in the show? That can be found in a previous blog post here.

As part of our degree show this year we all had to create a book to showcase some of the work that we have created and to talk about ourselves a little. I chose to focus on the fact that I am a very visual designer as I do a lot of illustration and photography, and also that the end result isn’t the entirety of what we do, the failures and the ideas are just as much an important part and they’re not something that we often get to show to people.

Originally the book that I created just had a blank cover with some text, but due to an unfortunate problem with a fellow classmate’s work looking too similar for comfort I decided to make a handmade cover which featured some of my illustration. Here’s some shots of the cover, which I finished last night.

And a closer shot of the actual artwork:

The book is currently on display at our degree show, Show Elleven. If you’re in the Lincoln area you should pop in.

I feel really bad for having neglected my blog for so long, but so much has been happening that I just haven’t found the time to do any blogging past the 140 characters of microblogging that Twitter offers.

University is now almost at an end now, third year did go just as fast as Barrie said it would and its almost terrifying to think that for now at least I’m pretty much done with education.

I won’t waste peoples time by posting loads of entries about all the work that I’ve done in the past year, as you can view my website for that curlyc.co.uk in case you’ve not yet visited, but I will be using this blog now as a way of keeping people up to date with general life, and work that I am doing right now.

Anyway, on with current life and we’ve spent the last month getting work ready for hand in and putting together our degree show. This has proved to be a challenging but hugely rewarding task which has kept a fair few of us in the studio all day painting, hanging work and even picking blutack off all the walls of a room (that was a fairly tedious task!)

The theme of the show for this year has been sounds, as we may be quite a small year group but we sure as hell make a lot of noise (both physically and with the way we create our work). To fit with this theme we all had to choose a sound effect that we felt reflected ourselves in some way and create a design based around that sound. I chose kiri-kiri which is a Japanese sound effect used for the sound of pens scratching on paper, something that I felt reflected quite a lot on the way that I work while doing my illustrations.

Show Elleven is going to be a much more open plan and area focused show than has been created in Lincoln before. Gone are the days of everyone having their own board to do what they want to with and instead everyone had to submit their two favourite pieces of work to a committee to be vetted for the show. I managed to get both of the pieces of work that I submitted in, the first being my ISTD Flatland book and the second being some large format illustration.

The work featured within Show Elleven is hugely varied and these photos don’t do it justice (especially as we’d yet to hoover up at this point). I’d urge everyone who’s gonna be near Lincoln between the 6th and the 17th of June to pop in and have a browse, you won’t be disappointed. Check out the Show Elleven website for more details.

Here’s a sneak peak of the illustration that I have featured. Again, the images don’t do it justice and the large image of the geisha’s is the original and is a tactile piece. Having not worked that large since my college life drawing lessons it was a nice change.

Look forward to lots more updates now I get back into the swing of things. I’ll be off to Wisby Nature Park at some point this week to shoot an entry into a photography competition.

Uni required us to choose the subjects for our dissertations recently, and to write a proposal ready for the actual dissertation next year (scary to think that its headed to that time already!) For mine I have chosen to look at Japanese street fashion- something that has fascinated me for years now.

I’ve started collecting resources for this already, but was wondering if you wonderful guys and girls could point me in the direction of any valuable sources I could be missing out on?

a2 posters used to show the juxtaposed words “shout happily”, “eat angrily” and “speak peacefully” All 3 were produced by hand, using a combination of chalks, collage,fineliner and a little bit of photoshop editing afterwards..